The Name of War

King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

By: Jill Lepore

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society

King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war - colonists against Indians - that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war".

It all began when Philip (called Metacom by his own people), the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. The war spread quickly, pitting a loose confederation of Southeastern Algonquians against a coalition of English colonists. While it raged, colonial armies pursued enemy Indians through the swamps and woods of New England, and Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley. Both sides, in fact, had pursued the war seemingly without restraint, killing women and children, torturing captives, and mutilating the dead. The fighting ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in August 1676.

The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war - and because of it - that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indians and Anglos. She shows how, as late as the 19th century, memories of the war were instrumental in justifying Indian removals - and how in our own century that same war has inspired Indian attempts to preserve "Indianness" as fiercely as the early settlers once struggled to preserve their Englishness.

Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.

©1998 Jill Lepore (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

Bancroft Prize, 1999

Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, 1998

"An evocative, powerful, and troubling book about a little-known war that speaks to all wars." (The New Republic)

"Brilliant.... Lepore's grasp of the complexities and varieties of the human beings in her drama matches that of a fine novelist.... This is history as it should be written." (The Boston Globe)

"Fascinating...rich in imagination, in moral ruminations about the meaning and justice of war." (The New York Review of Books)

One of the best.

I think the content of this book is up there with one of the best history books I’ve ever read. It is filled with primary sources and testimonies from colonists and indigenous accounts on the events of King Philip’s war. Lepore covers all of the “in between the dash” of the dates of the war. The perspectives of colonists, natives, and the emotional, spiritual, and physical toll of the war. I think this is a must read to understand the true nature of this struggle.

Sprawling!

I’ve listen for a few hours and I hardly heard about the war. So far it’s mostly about literacy of the period. Over and over again. I was looking for a history of the war, the beginning of it, events that happened during it and implications after the war. So far, 90% of it is about what was written at the time or what was written. Over and over again. I wanted to like this but I really wanted to learn about the actual war.

Worst reader

Don’t buy this book and listen to it because the reader is on able to keep her voice within tolerable range. She goes from bear whispers to screams that pierce the ears in seconds. She is unbearable.

Seriously ??

I think it's safe to disregard reviews which accuse this book of being 'anti-American' as the United States didn't even exist at the time. Anti-British ? Possibly though as the saying goes 'Facts are stubborn things." If the listener doesn't want their illusions of American wonderfulness and infallibility threatened I suggest they avoid any and all books about white settlers and native populations. The facts tend to speak for themselves and this exceptionally bloody chapter is no exception. It's a straightforward account of what happened and not particularly marred by frivolous opinion. If you don't want to know what happened then avoid this book.

“Splendid little war” with long and far-reaching impacts.

No “one-hit wonder”: thank you Jill Lepore! ( Not meant to be patronizing nor condescending.). Packing my library stopped short of boxing a 1998 unread hc edition of “The Name of War”. Fascinated by American Indian history, New England and U.S. history, warfare, language. (In interim had read Lepore’s recent and magnificent “These Truths”.) As ex-resident of the Farmington (CT) Valley who often visited King Phillips’ Cave, Simsbury, ex-GI took earned break in packing labors and started reading. Proportionally, King Phillips’s War had to be one of bloodiest in American history. Lepore,, with scholarship and grace, informs Anglo-American post-Colonial Americans of the lasting impact of language (written history) on the immediate prosecution of the war, its precedent-setting Anglo perception of indigenous peoples and the formation of a national character that would be echoed in botched “nation building”
In Vietnam,…Iraq,..,Afghanistan?….

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
(The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1998. ISBN 978-0-679-44686-6.)

I could not finish this...

I am a fan of the dullest of dull history but this is my second failed attempt to get through this book. I set down my paperback copy last year but figured I'd give it a try on my commute...no luck. Made it to the halfway point and decided to put it on the shelf again.

Was hoping for much more of a narrative history of King Philip's War, but quite honestly it seems that the author continuously writes in circles. This village was slaughtered, these houses were burned, so on and so forth without any context of the big picture of the conflict. Add on about 2 hours of flowery analogies of "doors" and "nakedness" and so on, and it really is just a bunch of drivel.

A painfully biased lecture on the evils of the white man

If you are looking for a book about king Philips war, this is not it. The author labors painfully through revising history and lecturing the reader on the evils of the white man and the virtues of the Indians. Whenever the Indians brutally tortured, dismembered, and ate the white settlers it was really the white mans fault. And of course, the lack of a written language is actually more sophisticated than white culture with their written language and book learning smh!

Jill is a woke leftist with an anti-American bias that shines through in this book and in her articles published in “The New Yorker” She is an anti-gun, Pro choice zealot who has a complete lack of understanding of our founding documents.